Population growth among Muslims good for business

religion news service |
May 17, 2012

WASHINGTON - Muslim consumers are growing in the U.S., and they have money to spend. Now, businesses are starting to take notice.

"The emerging American Muslim market is perhaps the new area that a lot of businesses … are starting to look into," said Rafi-uddin Shikoh, managing director and founder of DinarStandard, a marketing-research firm specializing in the emerging Muslim market.

Shikoh said his New York-based firm conducted research in 2011 on the Muslim marketplace and found that, though Muslims are just as hard to categorize as other groups, there are plenty of opportunities for different industries - food, retail and finance - to reach them.

With an estimated disposable income of between $107 billion and $124 billion, Muslim Americans can influence the market, he said. If a business offers halal food products, for example, Muslim consumers will pick that business over others.

"There are these unique things that businesses are not realizing, but there's an opportunity for that," he said at a recent forum sponsored by the American Islamic Congress.

The Pew Research Center last year estimated there are 2.8 million Muslims in the U.S., and they're growing in part because of a higher fertility rate than other Americans.

Though the exact number of American Muslims has been disputed, the consensus in the business world is that the majority of the growing Muslim consumers are young, middle class and misunderstood. Pew also found that U.S. Muslims (14 percent) roughly mirror the general population (16 percent) on the percentage of households with annual incomes of $100,000 or more.

Businesses now want to connect with this new market, said Sarab Al-Jijakli, account director at Ogilvy Noor, a boutique subsidiary of the Ogilvy & Mather global ad agency, which specializes in the emerging Muslim marketplace.

The racially and ethnically diverse Muslim population in the U.S. is concerned about the same issues as everyone else: jobs, the economy and health care, said John Pinna, the AIC's director of government and international relations. Like other immigrant groups, they're also looking for ways to participate in society.

And in America, that often means shopping.

"Now we're looking for products, we're looking to participate in the democratic process, and we're this young population that's hungry to be noticed," said Pinna, an Afghan-American Muslim.